Known for an inventive and versatile technique that has supplied the pulse for dozens of fine albums over the last decade, acoustic bassist Viktor Krauss gathers a superb group of players around him for his solo debut, FAR FROM ENOUGH. A respected sideman on stage and in the studio with artists as diverse as Lyle Lovett, Alison Krauss, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Elvis Costello, Krauss has enjoyed a particularly notable series of recent album collaborations with guitarist Bill Frisell, who in turn features on this album, at the front of a line-up that includes slide guitar master Jerry Douglas, veteran drummer Steve Jordan, and vocalist / violist Alison Krauss.

Written almost entirely by Krauss – and with the individual musical personalities of his collaborators very much in mind – the writing covers a wide spectrum of styles that Krauss has enjoyed listening to over time. Krauss delivers the album as ‘a soundtrack without a movie’. There are mood pieces such as ‘Overcast’, and the mellow title cut with Douglas as melodist, cinematic pieces like ‘Side Street’ the fast-paced ‘Grit Lap’, the punchy ‘Here To Be Me’, and the AC/DC influenced ‘Tended’, a chugging mid-tempo tune. Sister Alison Krauss supplies wordless vocalise on five tracks, including ‘Split Window’ and ‘Philo’, and vocals on the 1983 Robert Plant classic ‘Big Log’.

As one critic put it in describing 1998’s Frisell / Krauss / Keltner collaboration, with words that are equally apt here, it’s music with “the gut-first feeling of great rock, the subtleties of jazz, and the earnestness of country.”